Flashback: GOP Senate Candidates’s Anti-Gay Diatribe

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters.

Former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has some competition in the race to take on New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in November. In late February, former Sen. Bob Smith—who represented the Granite State in the Senate from 1990 until 2003 before losing a primary, moving to Florida, and twice running for Senate unsuccessfully there—threw his hat into the ring. Smith has vowed to debate Brown “in 10 towns he’s never heard of,” and offered him a map in case he got lost.

Notwithstanding the fact that Smith himself moved to Florida to start a real estate company after losing his primary, or that he once gave a 45-minute floor speech on why circus elephants shouldn’t be allowed on the Capitol grounds, there are plenty of reasons why Brown’s opponent may not be palatable to swing voters in a state that went to President Obama in 2008 and 2012. As a senator in the 1990s, Smith spent much of his time pushing back against the “gay agenda” and supposed attempts by LGBT radicals to indoctrinate children into their ranks. The propaganda campaign, according to Smith, was being pushed into public schools in the form of AIDS education literature and sex ed materials. In 1994, he joined with arch-conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to introduce an amendment that would strip federal funding from any school that promoted homosexuality as a “positive life style alternative”—or that directed students to organizations that did. Because when you’re trying to raise awareness about sexually transmitted diseases, the point is to be as vague as possible.

In an impassioned floor speech, Smith warned colleagues that he was prohibited by decency standards from displaying most of the materials he was hoping to de facto ban. Then he read aloud from the children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies:

When Smith was finished, he began reading from another book, Daddy‘s Roommate:

The kicker: In 2010, 14 years after Smith last won an election, New Hampshire made it legal for Heather’s two mommies to get married. Sure, Smith can tell voters he represented New Hampshire in Washington before, but it was a Granite State he’d need a road map to navigate today.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn’t fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation so we can keep on doing the type of journalism that 2018 demands.